Reivers dropped to his knees, shuddering, his arms shielding his eyes from imaginary beasts of the bottle.
“Take ’em away, boys,” he pleaded. “Kill the big ones, let the little ones go.”
With a snarl Moir leaped to his sledge and knocked the neck off a bottle of hooch.
“Drink, you scut!” he growled. “I’ll have dealings with you when you’re sobered up.”
Reivers drank and began to doze. Moir kicked him upright.
“Get into the shed with t’other jackass,” he commanded, propelling him toward the dugout into which MacGregor had crawled. “And in tuh morning you go to work, e’en though snakes be crawling all o’er ’ee.”
A faintly muttered curse greeted Reivers as he crawled into the dugout.
“You poor curs! What do you want with me now?” came MacGregor’s voice from a corner of the tiny room. “You skunk——”
“Easy, MacGregor Roy,” whispered Reivers quietly. “It’s not one of the ‘skunks.’”
“MacGregor Roy!” By the light that entered by a slit in the skin-flap Reivers could see the Scotchman painfully lifting his head from his miserable bunk, as he hoarsely repeated his own name. “MacGregor Roy! Who are you, stranger, to call James MacGregor by his family name?”